We love having little lanterns for the boys bedroom. Here is our summer version. It is very simple to make and only requires some dried pressed flowers and leaves of choice, used glass jar with smooth surface and wide enough for a candle, and a tiny bit of white glue.
Hope you enjoy. 🙂
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Hello everyone,
I wanted to quickly share this beautiful craft I saw on one of my favorite accounts on Instagram — goldnuss. That account always has beautiful and inspiring nature craft ideas for children.
We have made a few of these garlands almost a month ago, and they still are intact hanging on our windows.
This craft is very simple, but it probably would never occur to me, as dandelion puffs seem so fragile. How do you touch one without breaking? And as far as the yellow stage of flowers — once picked they turned into puffs in a day or so, but those puffs were small and undeveloped.
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This year we had a long and beautiful fall here in Colorado’s Front Range, and so we have collected a lot of leaves during our times in the mountains where boys attend their forest school program. We called them ‘forest jewels’.
In this quick post I wanted to share with you one of our crafts with those beautiful fall leaves. It is very simple. We made this craft with kids both indoors and outside, although having a windy day would make it challenging. This craft is also low waste — it uses forest finds such as leaves and sticks, and the only other supplies needed are a small amount of regular white glue and a bit of biodegradable string or twine.
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This year Ale unexpectedly got very excited about Halloween. All the way back in August. He patiently waited till October and till the leaves would start turning color. But when first leaves turned red and yellow there was no holding him back! And it is amazing how children bring back the magic into grown up lives as all of us, even my mom who is not into any of the Halloween themed things, got excited with him and got busy crafting skeletons and witch hats, baking ghost cookies, carving pumpkins and making all sorts of things to make Ale’s Halloween dreams come true. 🙂
My boys are very young, so when it came to Halloween themed books I was very fortunate to have come across this most lovely book. It is so perfect for children. The story is short and told in catchy rhymes, the characters and endearing and the story is very positive. And because it is told as a rhyme it is fun to remember and play out. And turns out there are so many beautiful online resources accompanying this book, so you could make coloring pages, puppet theater and much more.
And last, but not least, we were delighted to discover that there is actually an incredibly beautiful animated film created based on this book and is available on iTunes. Needless to say we watched it a million times over laughing and enjoying every little bit of it.
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In this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, perhaps a mother’s first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet and growing time, a full six years of passive receptive life, the waking part of it for the most part spent out in the fresh air. — Charlotte Mason
The very first outdoor play spot we added was this sandbox back when Ale was just 1 year old. And it has been continuously a popular play space for both boys. As Ale has grown his games around the sandbox have changed, but he still loves it. And of course, anything that Ale is interested in Eleon is there as well!
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A few months ago I came across these charming alphabet cards. I particularly liked them as they introduce both capital and small letters in a very associative and visual way. Ale already knows many Russian and English letters as we often talk about them a bit while reading our bed time stories. But the idea that same letter can have two different versions was rather confusing for him. And while in Montessori approach it is recommended to only introduce small letters at first, I found this to be impractical as all the books have both letters on their covers and naturally the subject of small and capital letters would always come into our discussions when we would start reading our bedtime stories.
So in these cards a small and a big version of the same letter is very nicely tied together through the same animal — the grown up one for the capital letter and a baby one for the small letter.
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I love plants and so does my mom! My husband enjoys our plant addition and our house is a bit of a jungle to be honest, with my work desk soon having no more room for any more plant pots. We even have a tomato plant in our bathroom (we got two giant windows right in the bathroom which I find rather inconvenient in general, but it worked out good for the tomato plant) that’s been yielding modest, but consistent crop of cherry tomatoes over the last couple months. 🙂
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A few months we got Ale his first table and chairs. I had many beautiful (and expensive!!) children furniture pieces bookmarked in my Pinterest boards. But considering what children’s possessions can go through in their exploration of the physical universe I knew that in the real world I needed some furniture pieces which Ale could comfortably sit on, eat on…draw on, bang thing on, climb on, spill things and so on and so forth 🙂 So IKEA Latt table + chairs set was a perfect choice. Just $25!! And it is made from solid wood, with the exception of table top and chair seats, both of which you can replace with real wood to eliminate any off-gasing ingredients.
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Last year we sort of skipped Christmas as we felt Ale was much to young to get the idea of gifts, Christmas tree and so on. But this year we were really looking forward creating a lovely and magical experience for him (while still keeping our rule of moderate number of gifts for everyone)!
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